It’s here, the big day! After months of planning, I was just hours away from becoming Mrs instead of Miss. Lack of sleep forgotten, I smiled as the sun lit up the spacious hotel room. Flowers in vases around it. Later, the dress feels glamorous. Dark pinky mauve, so different from white, and my carefully chosen colour scheme of a peach jacket with gold and pearl jewelry. The ring, the star of the show, 24 carat gold housing 11 diamonds. Perfect for the 11th day of April 2019. A fresh perfume like the incense of a flower bouquet. Not forgetting the flower crown where peach flowers match the ribboned bouquet. My heart beats quickly with the excitement of marrying my soulmate. A quick but poignant ceremony with promises and a deep kiss before the throwing of rose petals. Then a celebration at a rooftop hotel restaurant and a trip to a park with purple and yellow flowers in bloom and a heady smell of freshly-cut grass. Pure happiness so raw it is hard to keep tears at bay. Because this is our Big Day.
Day 2:
I did this assignment esterday but didn’t get a chance to post it until this morning. This will probably be the case with all my assignments.
Chronos, what a strange place it was, this town in the middle of the great Mojave Desert, if you could even call it a town. Route 66 ran through it, but, unlike back in its heydays, there were few cars traveling it. All the traffic came from the ramps leading to and from nearby Interstate 40. The only sounds at 2 in the morning came from the 18-wheelers on their way to or from I-40. The nearest city to the West was 50 miles away, the nearest city to the East was 100 miles away, with nothing but desert between. Felix, the man who owned this oasis, made a killing with the only cafe, motel and three gas stations between them. Chronos reminded Randy of a town out of an old western where the one man who owned the town made a killing off of those passing through. Felix, like his counterparts in all those old western movies, didn’t care who passed through or tarried in his town as long as they had money and Randy had plenty of money. Chronos would become Randy’s base of operations until he finished his book.
Kind of reinds me of my youthgrowing up on the family farms, spending most of my free time building stock cars and racing them on dirt tracks.
Day 3
Hello Daniel. Here is my day 3 work. This is great fun!
The ubiquitous Santa Ana winds. Whipping through the dry empty canals of Los Angeles, rolling past the graffiti defiled concrete piers and shaking loose the cardboard and plastic walls of the homeless shanty towns of this great (and dirty) city. It seeps through the cracks and crevices of the pristine middle-class homes, singing its high pitched siren song, beckoning all who hear to step outside so that they may be caressed and seduced.
Drought everywhere. drought here, where it drys the air, making it unpleasant to breathe as it scorches the nose, throat and lungs. Drought where it drys the grasses and kills tender green growth and blanches them lifeless. Drought weakens the pine trees, making them candidates for the bark beetles to end their life cycles. Drought beckoning its ally fire. Fire to devour every living thing within it’s path.
Day Three:
Mist. Mist oozing like a wound from the woolly clouds. Mist rising. Mist falling. Mist insinuating every creep and crevice lifting forth a chill from the loamy earth. Not rain; no thunder, no 'technics, just a still mist greying a damp world.
Nailed it! Since this has to be 20 characters long, I’m adding something . . .
Michelle Z - Great piece that captures an entire story, yet leaves it open for readers to want more of the story.
Elixeo - I can picture this scene, even though I’ve not experienced anything like it.
A. Clark - I liked how you described an “ordinary” scene in such a picturesque way. Like a photograph.
Sorry this is so late, loving this exercise though!
Day 1
Soon the sun will be scorching but for now it is soft and the breeze is light and fresh. The ocean sparkles and beckons across the glittering white sands but the soft perfumes of it’s embalmed depths become the sad phantoms of it’s dark and salty heart, drifting up from where the weeds stretch up and clutch, where the caverns stretch wide like mouths and white bones gleam like teeth. From below in the dark where the sea serpents and mermaids and deep monsters hunt, it breathes out, across the white sands, humming, shushing, soothing, and I inhale the soft incense of fear and the ocean-wild birds cry out as they sweep across the shining water: This placid blue surface, they call, it’s a lie a lie a lie.
I am content here in the light.
Trying to catch up!
Day Two
It used to be a good street, a street of families raising their kids, everyone excited about the future. It’s a bit decrepit now, the inhabitants old and tired, the yards dusty and lifeless, the street signs all tilted, pot holes all over the place, the houses looking worn in their chipped paint and faded colors. There’s a retired cop who wheels her elderly husband down to the corner park where the trees are all huge and shaggy and grass could do with regular watering. There’s the old judge, who everyone knows wasn’t actually a judge but owned a sports store. There’s life long housewives, dealers and once upon a time world travelers. There’s that old guy, he’s got to be at least eighty, but he still runs every day, no shirt from May till October, up past the church, around the loop of Fenick place down past the big school. He’s a lot slower these days but that’s a good two miles every day. Shuffle shuffle, one step at a time. I hope I can do as much at his age.
Sorry, I’m a little behind. Here’s my day one attempt.
House Cup Battles
I cannot see beyond my screen, the flowing words there more real than the floating stars unseen, embalmed in darkness beyond my window. The soft incense of the candle on the sill mingles with jasmine green in my mug. The timer counts down while my compulsive editing costs my house precious word count. My writing buddy streams words for Slytherin; they’ll win again if I don’t stop editing. My words for Hufflepuff splutter and splatter as I focus on the murmurous haunt of the clacking backspace key on autumn eves.
Day two:
It was certainly a strange town to have settled in. Souvenir shops and restaurants lined main street, all with facades that replicated a Bavarian town; and two blocks to the north were tiny little box homes with large perfectly manicured yards. The north end of main street was punctuated by a painted lady Victorian mansion, her tiny postage stamp lawn framed by an over-sized white picket fence. The owners did not invite people to their house, but liked to point it out whenever they were introduced to someone new and I often wondered if every town had someone move in for the sole purpose of spectacularly refusing to fit in.
So much snow. It is night, yet everything is an opaque curtain of white. There is no ground, no sky, no sound. The intensity and depth of unrelenting snowfall in this brutal New England February has me trapped at work, alone. My car is no more than twenty yards away, but it is invisible. I step outside and my breath is stolen by the wind, my eyes blinded by the icy shards of hard driven flakes. Back inside the building I stare out at a maelstrom of nature’s suffocating white turbulence. I stare as a hostage with the pressure of panic trying to burst its way out of my chest.
The familiarity of that neighborhood and of the people who lived there was shocking, despite everything. From the typical over-welcoming families, to the ones who always knew the latest news about everyone, even the noises were the same. As Selene walked down the flashing blue streets she reached the house with a big tree inside of it. Here the tree was purple and its leaves were of a fluorescent orange; a boy with curly ginger hair, and who looked like her frined Jim, was playing outside. As she started walking again, Selene saw the house that looked like hers and she couldn’t help but wonder if she would have seen the double self there.
“Hurry!” he said. I scurried along the circular brick path behind him. Still, the peaceful lake was breathtaking. I took in the sight of a pair of geese gliding peacefully as we rounded a corner. On the right, we happened upon a pale blue yet modern, two story building, decked behind pink and purple flowered trees. I angled my footsteps towards the brick stairs, but he kept on walking, passing it by. A pair of ducks fluttered overhead and dipped into the lake’s serene waters, and we passed by another building. This time it was a restaurant, but it was closed. Too early, I thought. Anyway, we were headed towards a shaded area up ahead, the brick path overhung with thick trees on both sides. “It’s up there,” he said, pointing to an old pale blue, rusted staircase. As we climbed the winding stairs, I wondered where it would end. Below, I caught hints of the glistening blue waters through the tree branches, distracting me from the inevitable climb. When we reached the top of that old, rickety staircase, he turned to me with a triumphant smile and said, “We’re here—this place makes the best coffee in the world.”
Day two
Clara’s eyes feasted from the top of the winding hill; houses drenched in umbers and pinks, tobacco stores and cafes strung with necklaces of live sea spiders climbing from invisible strings. Portugal was new for her, and the constant mist, a welcome relief from her life in Southern California where she worked as a teacher and a single mother. Day and night. Losing her footing she grabbed the iron railing, cutting her fall, damning her choice of smooth leather flats. Looking up she remembered Geronimo’s house, the patio railed with black iron, unable to contain terracotta pots spilling copious blooms of yellow freesia and their sweet scent. Lost in thought ,she gazed to the balcony where she could still feel his ripped arms holding her close while her eyes took in the ocean below. She wondered if he still lived here.
Thanks, Daniel. I’m really enjoying this course.
Day three:
Frost everywhere. Frost on the lawns, where it covers the grass with silver. Frost on the sidewalks, where it turns the ground into treacherous black ice. Frost on cars’ windscreens. Frost on garden taps. Frost filling up the neighborhood’s morning gossip as people drop the water hoses which are frozen stiff and rush inside for warm water to clean their windscreens. Frost making everybody late. Frost becoming Daddy’s excuse as he walks back inside and takes off his boots. Frost hanging on to our kitchen window pane as we watch it slowly change into a prism catching the first sunlight rays.
Day two:
Suddenly my world has changed from green to brown. My Facebook feed shows a myriad of brown houses, brown streets and a brown snaking river. Not the infinity pool spilling into Beirut city lights that announced my last posting. Tuk Tuks speed past as I side-step a puddle of sludge. Off a busy intersection, families sit on tiny plastic chairs sipping bottomless cups of coffee, cheerful, chatty as the sky turns copper. Why not sit by the Nile? At least there would be grass. But over the weeks I begin to see, like rainfall after a haboob, the city: clear, bright and alive. Jolting me out of my desert torpor rises a plume of cardamom, cinnamon and ginger. A woman hands me a steaming cup. She is wrapped in the sunniest of yellows, with shiny rings and a wide smile, erupting into laughter. Then in all its technicolour glory, I see Khartoum. Hospitality, generosity of heart and a lingering handshake, as a molasses voice asks about my family.
This is for the second lesson.
Jesse was bored especially when he traveled to Lewellen Gulch three times a week. Each week he looked down the Clark exit and made a mental note to just check it out some time. To date he never had. Maybe I’ll go down the Clark exit today he thought as he gazed at the long trail of cars end to end done Hwy 136. He maneuvered around a red minivan with a sleeping child, a staring dog, and a frazzled mother to tuck his truck behind a bright green Kia Seoul with blaring music, a beautiful girl, and a dent in the bumper. “Today is going to be a hot one,” the DJ stated on KRS Love, where the main thing is the main thing. Jesse swerved to the left with a wink at the Kia driver as she waved. The driver of the Hyundai Excel was not as friendly though equally pretty. He traveled half on the shoulder and half on the road down the well-maintained exit with the wildflowers planted strategically to distract him from any fears of getting lost.